Share

Elon Musk clearly knows his talents. He’s a billionaire who commands a small archipelago of companies, and he’s probably the first person you think of when you think of electric cars. But his real gift is both more prosaic and more important than any particular executive or managerial skill: Elon Musk knows how to get attention.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO was certainly putting that gift on display yesterday morning, when he made a striking and confusing claim about his recently launched infrastructure venture on Twitter:

Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.

Almost immediately — as transportation, tech, and infrastructure journalists frantically called the many government press offices implied in the tweet — headlines like “Musk Touts Approval of New York-Washington ‘Hyperloop’” also blared the claim uncritically. At first, it was unclear what exactly Musk meant yesterday morning, since reporters quickly discovered that the many government entities from which the Boring Company could’ve received “verbal govt approval” at the local, state, and federal levels didn’t know what he was talking about. By way of clarification, a spokesperson for the company told The Guardian that his boss was referring to “promising conversations” with government officials, though even then only the White House would cop to having participated in these conversations, and only in the vaguest terms.

The entire incident would be more surprising if it wasn’t simply what Musk does. Yesterday’s tweets are pure Musk shtick: lightly self-congratulatory, outlandish, opaque, and not really true, at least in the traditional sense of the word. It’s also emblematic of how Musk has helped to puff up his own legend. This isn’t even the first time he’s pulled something like this in the past week. On Saturday, he trotted out an old favorite of his, the overwhelming danger of artificial intelligence, while being interviewed by Nevada governor Brian Sandoval at a meeting of the National Governors Association. Musk made an appeal for the regulation of artificial intelligence, which he’s repeatedly said is a “fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.” It’s a claim actual roboticists look askance at, to put it politely, but that generally doesn’t stop Musk.

It’s not necessarily surprising that people pay close attention to Musk: He’s one of Silicon Valley’s best-known figureheads. But it’s interesting that Musk garners nearly as much coverage, if not more, than famous tech figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page, all of whom are worth vastly more than Musk, and have somewhat more concrete accomplishments on which their legends might be built.

But Musk doesn’t need to be batting 1.000 to get attention — especially not if he has a good understanding of how the media works. The tech press is both complicit in and trapped by the Musk shtick: “Eccentric Billionaire Has Strange Idea and/or Statement” is a story that’s hard to pass up, but it also means that when Musk says something as patently untrue as his “verbal govt approval” tweet, reporters have to contend with his coyness, even though he was almost certainly being deliberately vague in order to get written up and covered by cable news. There are decent ways to do this reporting, like pointing out that Musk may not be dealing in good faith, or not publishing headlines that seem to affirm — or at least uncritically spread — his dubious claims. But for the time being, as long as he wants press, Musk will get it, because he’s Elon Musk.

And because people want to read about Musk. Musk is in the business of trying to sell people a very specific and largely unrealized vision of the future, one that’s far more exciting, at least as he describes it, than those offered by the Zuckerbergs and Bezoses of the world. And he’s smartly realized that there is a public appetite for research-intensive, futuristic moon shots (sometimes literally), even if politicians and civil servants are wary of making those kinds of commitments. Musk, of course, has no such caution. But because his future doesn’t pay the bills or produce much in the way of tangible results as quickly as a giant logistics network or an advertising duopoly, he has to generate public excitement about the possibility of electric cars, vaporware hyperloops, and commercial trips to Mars. Those are large-scale, infrastructural projects that necessarily involve government support and regulatory hurdles. But that means the excitement Musk needs has to be ginned up with little concrete progress to help it along, which is why he has his shtick. When he can’t effectively lobby the government, he tries to appeal directly to the public. And because Musk is a salesman at heart, there’s inevitably some sort of ask. Here’s what it was yesterday:

If you want this to happen fast, please let your local & federal elected representatives know. Makes a big difference if they hear from you.